10h00 Story telling workshop – from Rupesh Shah

As a facilitator you are often in a position where you need to give instructions to people. And not just to get people back after tea.  You find yourself with a vague idea in your head, a half dreamt experience you want people to have or an imagined trajectory that you feel participants would learn from. If they are good enough, these fantasies want to be realised.

This means taking the idea and thinking about how you can help people move from where they are to where you might like them to be. It is perhaps relatively easy to do this if you don’t care too deeply about what people’s needs and responses are. You just shout instructions at them. But what if you want participants to have an experience of cooking, rather than that of simply being dragged through a series of steps in a recipe?

We did a story telling exercise this morning. I imagined an experience where participants would move from telling and hearing a 7-minute story of a great journey to a retelling and re-listening of it as a tale of mythic proportions in two minutes. It could see it involved different people taking different roles – original story owner and teller, story transmitters and a story guardian. But how to not lose people in the complex movement between different subgroups that was required.

To prepare for this it was important to clarify beforehand a sequence of logical actions that people would need to undertake. I could be seen dancing around the training room last night, murmuring to myself as I literally walked through exercise. It’s a bit a like a footballer rehearsing a physical movement again and again in practice training so that her muscles become accustomed to the particular experience.

And then like the footballer, a facilitator needs to be able to perform the trick when required in the middle of real match conditions. So I like to have the steps in mind, to stay true to them but also be aware of what is happening in front of me and the bigger purpose. Whilst I can’t do anything without the steps and micro movements, the danger is that if I get completely caught up in them I likely to trip up over a small blade of grass or a question coming from an unanticipated intelligence. And for me I can see a danger in shutting down the emergence of creativity.